Kaori Ogasawara was born in Japan and she studied ballet with her grandmother, Kazue Ogasawara, and Takao Hisamitsu. In 1993, she came to the US to train at the Boston Ballet School and later danced at Boston Ballet before joining Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre in 1999 with her husband, Christopher Rendall-Jackson. She was promoted to soloist in 2004. She has performed in several galas and appeared as a guest artist in the roles of Swanhilda in Coppelia, Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, the Sylph in La Sylphide, and the balcony Pas de Deux from John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet. After joing PBT, she performed many featured roles including the Sugar Plum Fairy and Marie in Terrence S. Orr’s The Nutcracker, Myrtha in Giselle, Mercedes in Don Quixote, Svetlana in Ben Stevenson’s Dracula, Queen of Hearts in Derek Dean’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland. She also had many opportunities to dance George Balanchine’s ballet including the Russian Lead Girl in Serenade, Sylvia Grand Pas de duex, Theme and variation, Divertimento No. 15, and Who cares?. She has also performed in contemporary ballets by choreographers such as Paul Taylor, Dwight Rhoden, and Jean-Christophe Maillot. Ms. Ogasawara and her husband retired from the stage in 2009, and they are the proud parents of two children, Emiya and Hana.
Katie Roy is a dancer / visual artist / scientist / educator who thrives off of creative process and believes there is immense power and beauty in multidisciplinary exploration.
Katie began her training at New England Ballet in her hometown of Wayland, MA. She started her performing career with Boston-area touring company Dance Prism.
Katie graduated from Dickinson College in 2015 with a B.S. with Honors in both Physics and Mathematics. Through participation in the co-curricular Dance Theatre Group, she also had the opportunity to perform work by Sarah Skaggs and NYC-based Pam Tanowitz and Christopher Williams, among others. Katie returned to Dickinson as a guest artist in the fall of 2015 to premiere a work based upon concepts in acoustic physics and presented the piece in its early stages in a collaborative salon with Professor L. Koss to discuss connections between differential equations and art.
Katie moved to San Francisco in 2017 to complete two years with the LINES Ballet | Training Program, during which time she performed work by choreographers Alex Ketley, Brett Conway, David Harvey, Erik Wagner, and Maurya Kerr. She was chosen to be a student choreographer to develop new works on her peers twice, with guidance from Christian Burns. In the fall of 2018, Katie began to teach the inaugural ChoreoLab class for Teens @ LINES, and since then, she has had the honor of watching her students perform works created in studio lab sessions at festivals across the Bay Area. Katie has also worked as the Training Program Coordinator since 2019.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | TEENS at LINES, Training Program, and Summer Program
Photography | © Katherine Brackman
Carmen Rozestraten is a founding member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet and danced with the company from 1978-1996. She is a senior faculty member for LINES Ballet’s education programs and teaches the company regularly. A native of Amsterdam, she has toured the world as a performer and educator, teaching at major ballet companies such as Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, Opera de Lyon and Spain’s Compañía Nacional de Danza.
She has choreographed for Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Institut del Teatre, Barcelona, the LINES Ballet Summer Program, the LINES Ballet Training Program, and LINES Ballet BFA at Dominican University of California.
Carmen has also made three award-winning dance films.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | BFA at Dominican, Dance Center, Summer Program, Training Program
Sandra Chinn is a ballet teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sandra has faculty and company positions with Alonzo King LINES Ballet, ODC/Dance, Shawl Anderson Dance Center, and Berkeley Ballet Theater, where she has been artistic advisor since 2018. She has been a visiting guest artist for Hollins University MFA Dance program, and is adjunct teacher at New York University Tisch Department of Dance Summer Festival since 2016. She has guest taught for Company Wayne McGregor, Jessica Lang Dance, the dancers of Paul Taylor Dance Company, Abraham.In.Motion, Lucinda Childs Dance, Smuin Ballet, Aszure Barton and Artists, Amy Seiwart’s Imagery, Post:Ballet, SF DanceWorks, Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, and BODYTRAFFIC. She is beloved for her somatically informed pedagogy that draws on Body-Mind Centering, Pilates, Feldenkrais, Franklin Method, Alexander Technique, Iyengar Yoga, GYROTONIC®, and GYROKINESIS®. She received an Isadora Duncan Special Achievement Award for “her commitment to and excellence in the training, teaching, inspiring, and motivating dancers throughout the dance community” for the 2018-19 season.
During her performing career in New York City, she was a company member of Dennis Wayne’s Dancers, Finis Jhung’s Chamber Ballet USA and Bob Bowyer’s American Ballet Comedy. She was featured in the off-Broadway dance show “Funny Feet,” for which she received a Drama Desk Award nomination as “Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical.” She is a graduate of the National Academy of Arts (Champaign, Ill.), and she continued her studies at the Joffrey Ballet School (NY), and intensively with Maggie Black. She is grateful for a performing and teaching career in the concert dance field and she looks forward to continuing her work and studies for many years to come.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | Dance Center, Summer Program, Training Program
Photography | © Nick Korkos
Victor Talledos is an international independent artist based in SF. He began his dance training at Conservatorio de Danza in Mexico City and graduated from Escuela Superior de Musica y Danza de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico. In 2008, he moved to NYC to attend the Ailey School for two years. Victor has performed for Proyectos en Movimiento dance company and Ballet Moderno de Mexico-Las Bestias in Mexico. In 2010, Victor moved to San Francisco and became part of the Bay Area Dance community, he has worked for Robert Moses’ Kin Dance Company, Copious Dance Theater, Labayen Dance San Francisco, Alayo Dance Company, The Anata Project, RAWDance SF, among others. As a choreographer, Victor has shown his work in venues including Ailey Citigroup Theater, Dance New Amsterdam for the “Latin Choreographers Festival” in NYC, Dance Mission Theater for the “Latin American Contemporary Choreographers Festival” in SF, Safe House Arts, Cowell Theater. He has been a guest choreographer for Labayen Dance, Copious Dance Theater and Emote Dance Theater.
Victor is currently faculty member for all education programs at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, from Teens at LINES to the BFA Program at Dominican University of California. He is part of the Modern Dance faculty at Berkeley Ballet Theater and teaches open classes (ballet, modern and contemporary) at Alonzo King LINES Dance Center. Victor has also taught in places including ODC Dance Commons, Shawl Anderson Dance Center, and Westlake School for the Performing Arts and has been a guest artist at Stanford University, guest teacher and choreographer at Mills College, guest choreographer at The Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA). He has taught workshops in Amarillo, Texas, Mexico City and Monterrey, Mexico. Aside from his professional dance career, Victor is also a visual artist, part-time model and photographer.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | BFA at Dominican, Dance Center, School Programs, Summer Program, Teens at LINES, Training Program
Photography | © Victor Talledos
Brett Conway is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and artistic director of SFDanceworks. As a former company dancer of Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theater, Brett has worked with many influential choreographers, including Alonzo King, Jiri Kylian, Paul Lightfoot, Sol Leon, Mats Ek, Crystal Pite, Marco Goecke, and Ohad Naharin. Since 2017, Brett has been on faculty with the LINES Dance Center and LINES Ballet’s education programs.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | BFA at Dominican, Dance Center, Summer Program, TEENS at LINES, Training Program
Photography | © Nick Aitken